Reading religion in Norwegian textbooks: are individual religions ideas or people?

Different religions are treated in different ways in Norwegian sixth form textbooks. We carried out an exhaustive content analysis of the chapters devoted to individual religions in textbooks for the Religion and Ethics course currently available in Norway, using rigorous indicators to code each word, image and question according to whether they were treated the religion as a set of ideas or a group of people. After adjusting for trends in the different kinds of data (word, image, question), we found that Buddhism and Christianity receive significantly more attention for their ideas than Hinduism, Islam and Judaism, which are treated more as people. This difference cannot be explained by the national syllabus or the particularities of the individual religions. The asymmetry also has implications for the pupils’ academic, moral and pedagogical agency for which teachers play a critical role in compensating.acceptedVersio

Tide gauge-based sea level variations since 1950 along the Norwegian and Russian coasts of the Arctic Ocean: Contribution of the steric and mass components

We investigate sea level change and variability in some areas of the Arctic region over the 1950–2009 period. Analysis of 62 long tide gauge records available during the studied period along the Norwegian and Russian coastlines shows that coastal mean sea level (corrected for Glacial Isostatic Adjustment and inverted barometer effects) in these two areas was almost stable until about 1980 but since then displayed a clear increasing trend. Until the mid-1990s, the mean coastal sea level closely follows the fluctuations of the Arctic Oscillation (AO) index, but after the mid-to-late 1990s the co-fluctuation with the AO disappears. Since 1995, the coastal mean sea level (average of the Norwegian and Russian tide gauge data) presents an increasing trend of ∼4 mm/yr. Using in situ ocean temperature and salinity data down to 700 m from three different databases, we estimated the thermosteric, halosteric and steric (sum of thermosteric and halosteric) sea level since 1970 in the North Atlantic and Nordic Seas region (incomplete data coverage prevented us from analyzing steric data along the Russian coast). We note a strong anti-correlation between the thermosteric and halosteric components both in terms of spatial trends and regionally averaged time series. The latter show a strong change as of ∼1995 that indicates simultaneous increase in temperature and salinity, a result confirmed by the Empirical Orthogonal Function decomposition over the studied region. Regionally distributed steric data are compared to altimetry-based sea level over 1993–2009. Spatial trend patterns of observed (altimetry-based) sea level over 1993–2009 are largely explained by steric patterns, but residual spatial trends suggest that other factors contribute, in particular regional ocean mass changes. Focusing again on Norwegian tide gauges, we then compare observed coastal mean sea level with the steric sea level and the ocean mass component estimated with GRACE space gravimetry data and conclude that the mass component has been increasing since 2003, possibly because of the recent acceleration in land ice melt

Situating Moral Education in a Globalized World: Environmental Ethical Values and Student Experiences

Since the 1980s the United Nations has called for a sustainable development, responding to the challenges of ecological crisis, global warming, and continuous social inequity. Within the sustainable development agenda environmental ethical values are addressed, formulated as concerns for human beings in the present and the future, and for the more-than-human world. These values are also central in UNESCO’s initiative of education for sustainable development. This chapter is an empirical study based on observations of a class of tenth grade Norwegian students who are exposed to the challenge of sustainable development in moral education. I examine how the environmental ethical values formulated by UNESCO are recontextualized in the classroom. The analyses are informed by critical cosmopolitanism, with a sensitivity for the situatedness of the students in a web of relations. In the particular lesson in which sustainability is addressed, carbon footprint plays a significant role, drawing attention to the students’ consumption patterns. In this way the issue becomes individualized and depoliticized, reflecting central tenets in neoliberalism. National concerns seem to add to this impact of hegemony. Informed by a retrospect group interview, the article demonstrates the potential of bringing in the students’ web of relations in moral education, addressing both their global and local embeddedness. An educational practice is suggested, in which the environmental ethical values are disclosed and explored, involving the students’ situatedness, and mediating between the ethical and the political